Page 124 of The Lumberjack and the City Slicker

I press a kiss into her hair.

“Maybe it’s cause I’m done hiding,” I say softly.

And in the darkness of my cabin, with her wrapped around me and the faint scent of wood smoke in the air, I let myself imagine something I haven’t allowed in years.

Not solitude.

Not survival.

Just living.

With her.

Chapter 25

Clara

The first time I had sex with Greyson?

It was incredible.

Amazing. Unplanned. Completely unexpected.

Like lightning striking dry earth.

But the blowout after?

The cold morning.

The not-so-quiet dismissal.

That dulled the shimmer of what should’ve been one of those once-in-a-lifetime, cosmic events.

It turned magic into something fragile.

The second time I had sex with Greyson?

Tonight, after the carnival, after the apologies, after he stood in front of me and chose honesty instead of pride?

Totally mind-blowing.

There’s something intoxicating about being wanted by a man who isn’t pretending anymore.

Who isn’t posturing.

Who isn’t running.

But the third time we had sex—the one that happened hours later, when the fire had burned down to embers and the world outside his cabin was nothing but black sky and whispering trees—that one might have broken me.

Because it wasn’t just heat.

It wasn’t just hunger.

It was quiet.

We had already come together once tonight in a blaze of breath and skin and tangled sheets.

We had already laughed, already collapsed against each other, already whispered things that felt dangerously close to promises.